NYU Press

Chapter Title: Affect

Chapter Author(s): Ann Cvetkovich

Book Title: Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Second Edition

Book Editor(s): Bruce Burgett, Glenn Hendler
Published by: NYU Press. (2014)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1287j69.6

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1 modern notions of subjectivity and power that conceive
Affect
Ann Cvetkovich
“Affect” names a conceptual problem as much as a
tangible thing. As such, it is best understood as an
umbrella term that includes related, and more familiar,
words such as “feeling” and “emotion,” as well as
efforts to make distinctions among them. The Oxford
English Dictionary (OED) traces the history of the term
to the seventeenth century, aligning it with “desire”
or “passion” and opposing it to “reason.” Further
specifying that “affect” is both a “mental” and a “bodily”
disposition, the OED sets in place a persistent ambiguity
that challenges distinctions between mind and body.
More technical uses of the term emerge from mid-
twentieth-century scientific psychology, where “affect”
designates sensory processes or experiences prior to
cognition and distinguishes such sensations from the
cognitive processes that produce emotions (Damasio
1994). Because affect, emotions, and feelings stand at the
intersection of mind and body, cognition and sensation,
and conscious and unconscious or autonomic processes,
it is not easy to identify the material basis for their social
and historical construction, which includes parts of the
body (nerves, brains, or guts) as well as environments
and transpersonal relations.
As the recent declaration of an “affective turn”
in American studies and cultural studies suggests
(Clough and Halley 2007; Gregg and Seigworth 2010),
the current prominence of “affect” as a keyword
represents the convergence of many strands of thinking.
Foundational for both fields are French theorist Michel
Foucault’s histories of the social construction of
categories such as body, gender, and sex that seem like
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natural phenomena. These categories form the basis for
of the self as possessing a depth or interiority evident
in the supposed natural truth of feelings (Foucault
1976/1990). Following this line of research, the affective
turn takes up debates about the construction of binary
oppositions between reason and emotion and the
reversal of hierarchies that subordinate emotion to
reason as part of a mind/body split often associated with
the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes.
In the Cartesian worldview, passions, instincts, and
feelings are unruly and uncontrollable, requiring
subordination to the rational control of reason and
the mind—a hierarchical ordering that has sometimes
led to a romantic embrace of their subversive power. In
response to such reversals, Foucault’s critique of the idea
that freedom of expression and resistance to repression
constitutes political liberation has inspired cautionary
accounts of the politics of affect. Efforts to historicize
subjectivity and to conceive of the self in non-Cartesian
terms have required new conceptions of affect, emotion,
and feeling. Indeed, the use of the term “affect” rather
than “feeling” or “emotion” arguably stems from the
desire to find a more neutral word, given the strong
vernacular associations of “feeling” and “emotion” with
irrationality.
Within cultural studies, the project of accounting
for social life and political economy through everyday
and sensory experiences, including feelings, has an
extensive history. Affect, emotion, and feeling have been
central to long-standing efforts to combine Marxism and
psychoanalysis and to theorize the relations between
the psychic and the social, the private and the public.
Psychoanalysis has used “affect” and related categories
as part of a vocabulary for drives, unconscious processes,
and the psychic energies created by both internal and
external stimuli. The term “affect” is also present in
13
 social and cultural theories that seek alternatives to
psychoanalytic models, such as Eve Sedgwick’s use of
Sylvan Tompkins, who describes nine affects that link
outward behavior with mental and physical states
(Sedgwick and Frank 1995; Sedgwick 2003). Whether
drawing on psychoanalysis or on its alternatives, accounts
of psychic life and felt experience have been important
to cultural studies in its efforts to explain the social and
political uses of feeling (including the divide between
reason and emotion) and to negotiate differences of
scale between the local and the global, the intimate and
the collective. Raymond Williams’s elusively suggestive
term “structure of feeling” (1977/1997, 128–35) is a good
example of the use of the vocabulary of feeling to describe
how social conditions are manifest in everyday life and
how felt experience can be the foundation for emergent
social formations. Rather than being attached to one
theoretical school or discipline, “affect” has named
multiple projects and agendas, including broad inquiry
into the public life of feelings. Following Williams, the
vernacular term “feeling” remains a useful way to signify
these projects, which extend beyond the question of
specifying what affects are.
Though the affective turn has conceptual roots
in Marxism and psychoanalysis, it has also been
significantly catalyzed by feminist critiques of the
gendering of dichotomies between reason and
emotion, which made their way into the academy from
popular culture and political movements. The 1970s
feminist cultures of consciousness raising reversed
the disparaging association of femininity with feeling
and, in a version of the discourse of sexual revolution,
celebrated emotional expression as a source of feminine
power associated with social and political liberation
(Sarachild 1978; Lorde 1984b). Subsequent generations
of scholarship in feminist cultural studies have been
more skeptical about an easy reversal of the reason/
14  Affect
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emotion binary, the often essentializing assumption
that women are more emotional or nurturing than
men, and claims for affective expression’s liberatory
possibilities. Instead, this scholarship has provided
rich and nuanced histories of the centrality of feeling
to the relations between private and public spheres
and especially of how the intimate life of romance, the
family, and the domestic sphere serves as the foundation
for social relations of power (Davidson and Hatcher
2002). In the field of American studies, scholarship
on categories such as sentimentality, sensationalism,
sympathy, melodrama, and the gothic has shown
how cultural genres, especially fiction, produce social
effects through mobilizing feeling (Tompkins 1985;
S. Samuels 1992; Cvetkovich 1992; Halberstam 1995).
Attention to affect is the culmination of several decades
of feminist scholarship on clusters of related terms such
as “domesticity,” “family,” and “marriage,” as well as on
the historical continuities that link women’s popular
genres, such as domestic and sentimental novels,
theatrical melodrama, and women’s film (L. Williams
2002; Berlant 2008).
The far-reaching impact of feminist approaches
to feeling and politics, including their relevance to
histories of racism and colonialism, is exemplified by
scholarship on the sentimental politics of abolition
in texts such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s
Cabin (1852/1981), nineteenth-century slave narratives,
and contemporary neo-slave narratives. Stowe uses
representations of slave mothers separated from
their children and innocent slaves being beaten to
generate appeals to universal feeling as the marker of
the humanity of slaves and as the inherent result of
witnessing the evils of slavery. Scenes of sexual intimacy
between master and slave prove more affectively
complex, however, in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
(1861/2001), in which Harriet Jacobs grapples with
Ann Cvetkovich
how to represent her sexual relations with white men
without losing the reader’s sympathy. Toni Morrison’s
historical novel Beloved (1987) further challenges the
tradition of the sympathetic slave mother by telling the
story of a woman who tries to kill her three children
in order to protect them from slavery, aiming for a
more complex representation of the affective life of
slavery than stark scenes of innocence and guilt. The
powerful fusion of secular forms of religious feeling and
maternal sentiment in abolitionist discourses provides
a model for the representation of social suffering that
has had a lasting impact on U.S. cultural politics in
both popular entertainment and the news media.
What Lauren Berlant (2008) has called the “unfinished
business of sentimentality” persists not just in popular
genres produced for women but also in realist and
documentary forms of representation, including
human rights discourses, in which spectacles of
suffering are used to mobilize public action. Affectively
charged representation is part of everyday life across
the political spectrum, and images of political prisoners
at Abu Ghraib, children of war, and unborn babies
prompt ongoing debate about the politics of sensation,
sentiment, and sympathy (Berlant 2004; Staiger,
Cvetkovich, and Reynolds 2010).
Another important area of scholarship in which
feeling and affect are central are discussions of trauma
and cultural memory that have emerged in American
studies as it reckons with the legacies of slavery, genocide,
and colonialism. Although the urgencies of Holocaust
memory have inspired the creation of public memorials
and testimony as forums for emotional expression in
Europe and elsewhere, slavery and genocide provide
a specifically U.S. genealogy for trauma studies and
cultural memory. In seeking to address traumatic
histories, public cultures of memory raise questions
about what emotional responses constitute a reparative
Affect
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relation to the past and whether it is ever possible to
complete the work of mourning, particularly while
social suffering is ongoing. Drawing on psychoanalytic
categories of mourning and melancholy, critical race
theory and queer studies (especially work on AIDS) have
produced new theories of melancholy or unfinished
mourning as productive rather than pathological. These
fields depart from psychoanalytic categories of affect
and trauma in favor of vernacular vocabularies of affect
in indigenous, diasporic, and queer cultures (Crimp
2002; Eng and Kazanjian 2002; Cvetkovich 2003).
Queer studies has also made important contributions
to embracing ostensibly negative emotions such as
shame and melancholy, as well as theorizing queer
temporalities that favor affectively meaningful
representations of the past rather than accurate or
realist documentation (Love 2007; E. Freeman 2010).
While these critical histories of affect as a cultural
and social construct have been extremely generative in
American studies, a second important line of research
has returned to theories of embodiment and sensation
to ask new questions about the material basis for affect,
emotions, and feelings. The use of the term “affect”
by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to describe the
impersonal intensities, forces, and movements that
cause bodies and objects to affect and be affected by
one another has been especially influential in recent
scholarship (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Massumi
2002b; Stewart 2007; Puar 2007). Deleuze’s work
usefully displaces psychoanalysis and decenters the
individuated subject of cognition, locating unconscious
bodily processes and sensory life at the center of social
life. Deleuze has also been a major catalyst for new
materialist notions of affect that distinguish more
sharply between “affect” and “emotion,” preserving
“affect” for noncognitive processes and using “emotion”
to describe socially constructed behavior.
Ann Cvetkovich 15
 Clearly, the multidisciplinary question of what it
means to be a sensory being cannot be confined to one
theoretical school, and American studies and cultural
studies have been invigorated by proliferating forms of
affect studies. Phenomenology and cultural geography
have provided resources for materialist histories of
sensory experience as well as new accounts of the
relations between bodies, objects, and environments
and of terms such as “mood” and “atmosphere” (Ahmed
2006; Thrift 2008). Neurobiology and cognitive science
have been embraced by scholars in the humanities
interested in the interface between brain and body in
constituting sensory experience, including reading
and other forms of aesthetic and cultural reception
(E. Wilson 2004; Zunshine 2006). Animal studies and
ecocriticism contribute to a posthumanist concept of
humans as integrated with animals, things, and nature
and to understandings of affective experience as bodily
sensation and vital force (Haraway 2008; Grosz 2011;
J. Bennett 2010). With the project of overturning old
hierarchies between mind and body, cognition and
feeling, reason and emotion largely accomplished, affect
studies is now promoting new interdisciplinary inquiry
across science and humanities. In so doing, it offers
answers to the long-standing problem in social theory
of how to think the relation between the psychic and
the social worlds and provides resources for building
new cultures of public feeling.
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2
African
Kevin K. Gaines
The keyword “African” has been and remains a
touchstone for African-descended peoples’ struggle for
identity and inclusion, encompassing extremes of racial
denigration and vindication in a nation founded on
the enslavement of Africans. Both the African presence
throughout the Americas and its significance for
constructions of national culture in the United States
have remained fraught with racialized and exclusionary
power relations. In a nation that has traditionally
imagined its culture and legislated its polity as “white,”
“African” has often provided for African Americans a
default basis for identity in direct proportion to their
exclusion from national citizenship.
As scholars ranging from Winthrop Jordan (1969)
to Jennifer L. Morgan (2004) have noted, there was
nothing natural or inevitable about the development of
racial slavery in the Americas. Nor was the emergence of
the racialized category of the African as permanent slave
foreordained. European travelers who recorded their
initial encounters with Africans did not perceive them
as slaves. But their ethnocentric self-regard informed
their descriptions of Africans as extremely different
from themselves in appearance, religious beliefs,
and behavior. European constructions of the bodily
difference, heathenism, and beastliness of Africans
mitigated occasional observations of their morality
and humanity. As European nations experimented
with systems of forced labor in the Americas, initially
enlisting indigenous peoples and European indentured
servants as well as Africans, ideologies of African
inferiority facilitated the permanent enslavement